Heroku is a service that provides web application hosting. They have a
free-of-cost tier. If you want to create a web URL for the changes you’ve
made to your version of the OpenHatch site, deploying that code to Heroku
is an easy, no-cost way to do that.

The steps are all listed below. Keep reading to start following
them. Note that many of the instructions require typing commands into
a command prompt.

To use the Heroku service, you’ll need to create an account on their
website and install software that makes it easy to interact with their
service.

Read their instructions to do that. Be sure to configure your SSH
key with the service. (If you need help with that, read their docs or
find OpenHatch people on IRC.) Finally, make sure you have run the
“heroku login” command.

If you don’t see instructions for your operating system, look in this page’s
Troubleshooting section.

On the Heroku service, individual sites are called “apps”. You’ll need
to create an app corresponding to the code you want to deploy
there. At the time of writing, you are permitted to create an unlimited
number of apps for free. Therefore, I personally recommend creating an
app whose name is similar to the branch name on your computer.

This app name appears in public as part of the domain name, so choose
something you don’t mind other people reading! (If you leave out the app
name, Heroku will pick a random cute name for your app.)

Because of the large size of the OpenHatch git repository, the first
git push may take a few minutes.

As you make local changes, you can just use the same “git push”
command to update the code on Heroku. Note that if you end up
rewriting history, you may need to add a plus sign to the above
command, e.g.:

If Heroku doesn’t have instructions for your operating system, and you
have a package manager, try installing git and rubygems from your
package manager. For example, on Fedora and other systems that use yum,
you could type: